The Prophecy of the Lake

The Prophecy of the Lake (La profecía del lago) is an unreleased and lost Bolivian silent feature film, directed by José María Velasco Maidana and completed in 1925.

La profecía del lago
Directed byJosé María Velasco Maidana
Release date
completed in 1925
but never released
CountryBolivia
Languagesilent

It was Velasco Maidana's first film, and would have been the second ever Bolivian-made fiction feature released, just after Pedro Sambarino's Corazón Aymara (1925). Set in contemporary Bolivia, it was a love story between an Aymara man and the daughter of a white landowner. Scheduled for release on July 28, it was censored and cancelled by the authorities, due to its "social critique" (highlighting the condition of indigenous Bolivians) and the controversial idea of a white woman falling in love with an indigenous man.[1][2] The government ordered Velasco Maidana to surrender the film to be burned; in a 1979 interview, the director and his wife recalled that he threatened to burn himself along with his work.[3] He managed to hide it in the walls of his house.[3]

Velasco Maidana subsequently directed Wara Wara (1930), which was accepted by censors as it reversed the gender roles and moved the setting to the sixteenth century, portraying the love of a conquistador for an Inca princess. The Prophecy of the Lake is a lost film, as there are no known copies of it in existence; Wara Wara is the only known surviving work from Bolivia's silent-film era.[4]

See also

References
  1. Perrin, Bernard (October 15, 2010). "Une révolution culturelle". Le Courrier (in French). Archived from the original on April 15, 2012. Retrieved February 21, 2012.
  2. "Wara Wara". The Bioscope. Retrieved February 21, 2012.
  3. Himpele, Jeff D. (2008). Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes. U of Minnesota Press. pp. 99–100. ISBN 0816639183. Retrieved March 25, 2013.
  4. Cabitza, Mattia (October 29, 2010). "Bolivia's struggle to preserve its film heritage". BBC Online. Retrieved February 21, 2012.


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